The challenge: To write a story that included the phrase "First zip, then fasten."

Constable Benton Fraser, RCMP, smiled as the clock struck noon. Now that his morning's sentry duty was completed, he looked forward to lunch with his friend, Ray Vecchio, followed by an enjoyable afternoon off. He planned to spend it taking care of his laundry and made a mental note to himself to purchase some more Argo Gloss Starch for his drawers. He and the wolf, Diefenbaker, covered the distance to Ray's police precinct house easily.

As he entered the bullpen, Fraser was surprised to see Ray hunched over the personal computer which had recently been added to the clutter on the detective's desk. He made as if to strike the monitor with his fist, then snatched a diskette out of the drive and slammed it on the desk.

"Trouble, Ray?" asked Fraser pleasantly.

"Yeah," returned his friend. "Frannie scanned a picture of the kids. I'm supposed to use my e-mail account to send it to Ma's sister in Florida. Only I can't even get it off this disk!" Ray swore in disgust.

"May I?" enquired Fraser pleasantly.

"Yeah, be my guest."

Fraser busied himself at the machine for a few moments.

"There's really nothing to it, Ray," he said, turning to the aggravated detective. "Let me show you what to do."

"Right," Vecchio was still disgusted.

"First of all, the scanned picture is very large. You'll want to compress it. We use a utility called PKZIP to do that. Here, just drag the filename of the picture over to this icon that looks like a "C" clamp. That will compress the file for you."

"Sure thing, Benny," Vecchio's eyes had a glazed look.

"Next you'll want to mail it to your aunt. Click on this icon that looks like a letter and fill in your aunt's e-mail address. Did you want to send her a personal message?"

"No thanks, Benny. Just the picture."

"Ah. Well then, click on this icon that looks like a paper clip and type in the name of the file. Rather like fastening a paper photo to a paper letter with a clip." Fraser followed his words with actions and the e-mail was shortly on its way to Florida.

"So you see, Ray, there's really nothing to it. Next time you want to send a picture to your aunt, first ZIP, then FASTEN."